Rolled in the X-Mas season with a December 1st
office christmas party. It was a decent affair. We
partook of shots of whiskey and cherry brandy
in the late afternoon at Art's place, and upon arrival at Bridges Restaurant, I moved onto Jim Beam at the bartenders suggestion.

The turnout was good. Over eighty people, including
the not-too-often-seen-at-social-functions Mehrdad
and his wife.

The food was not too interesting, but that was
OK, as I wasn't that interested in eating. I didn't want
a big meal "slowing me down". Drinks were a little pricey (or a lot pricey, as I was laying out $15 for a double after a generous tip). There was a speech by Marco, and there was swag and gifts given out.

There was to be dancing, but the music was too
eclectic a mix for any serious dancing sessions. Scientists
aren't always the most eager to get out and there and
cut a rug either. Some techs were dancing and Chris
L. was a young Don Juan-type on the floor.

Dinner took some time to be served, and it wound
up being too late to go out, and too early to go home,
so we shuffled off to Boston Pizza and Justin and I
recounted old tales of the legendary Stormix trade
shows.

And then the next morning I felt rather spun and less
than 100%. And in the afternoon I fell asleep on the
couch and awoke to Atushi dropping off John from
the camping trip.

Discussing nightly dreams has become a topic
with the GSC lunchers. I had at three last night:

The first happened maybe around 5 am, as it
was punctuated by a rolling over in bed and a glance at
the clock. My family went out on the ocean on boat,
that contained two huge pontoons, the rest of the boat was made of a mish mash of tarps and cheap plastic. Really slow,
and really manouverable, and the name of the boat was
Sagedogs. I'm sure there was lots of other stuff
going on, but the rest is lost in the fog.

Atsushi came by at 8:30 am to pick up my roommate
John for the snow camping trip, and I could hear voices
in the other room. I fell back into a deeper sleep around
9 am. This time there was a woman, with long reddish orange
hair. And we travelled with a group of other acquaintances,
again by boat, to some strange form of 16th century
Italy. A dark haired, sinister Machiavellian man who had been wooing the woman and the trip over was there.
It got dark and the three of us laid down in some large
bed. The man and woman side by side, with me crouched
uncomfortably at the foot of the bed. The man got up
at some point, and I turned 90 degrees, so that my feet
were beside the womans waist and vice versa. At this point we began flirting, playing footsies and kicking the
covers around. This went on for some time, as in reality,
my covers had done a 90 degree turn at some point in the
night, and there was no longer any sheet protection for
my feet. Eventually we got up, and the dark haired man
came back. He wanted me to leave and I was saying he should go. He became threatining, as he was known to ahve a gang of thieves and thugs under his command.
So I took a small, very sharp bread knife, and began hacking
the fingers off his left hand. At this point he began
screaming and noticed that his fingers were very small.
I looked closer and noticed that his hand was the size and
shape of a fork. Then I woke up.

Oh, and I also dreamed about Maid Marian at some point last night too. Maid Marian was Beej's brother (Beej is my cat), but he was killed by a car four years ago. Not
much happened in the dream, I just noticed the cat, and
start petting it, saying, "how come I never pay attention
to you anymore kity?"

Work is interesting and challenging and fun. More
and more of the biojargon is starting to make sense,
so that's nice. Maintaining and expanding a large
code base is challenging. At lunch, we've been playing
frisbee, which is fun.

Nethack has been
all the rage, what with some big month long tournament
going on or something. I suck at nethack. I always die
on level 4 or 5. I should run away from the tough monsters
and eat fewer zombie corpses. But I play fast and careless.

"I tried to tell my kids, you don't realize ... you
know, there was a certain charm."

Whew! Halloween partied at the Wett Bar with DJ Doc Martin,
who had things moving well and good with his signature jungle
bongo-energy spinning. Enjoyed gin and beer and the costumes.

This morning though, at werk. Wow. It was not possible to
write code. Me poor head full of cotton balls. Me poor brain.

Preparing to take over the maintainence of the sequencing
database for the next two months during Ran's sabbatical absence. There's a whole mountain o' Perl code needing to be maintained.
Today spent some more time poking around the glossaries on the
web. Restriction enzymes, aliqouts, ET Terminators, BigDye Terminators and more.

Next week I'll also be poking around in Mapping. Mapping
seems weird, working with all the image bands they use
the object-oriented AceDB a fair bit.

Oh, and I scheduled to do a talk about the Zope-powered intranet in three weeks for the benefit of my co-worker client-base.

Bacteria is like little bugs. Real small bugs. There are three kinds of these "mini-bugs": Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya. Bacteria are the simplest. They don't have the complex cell structure of the Eukarya. The Eukarya are pretty nifty - they weren't discovered until the 1970s - and they can survive in temperatures up to 90 C.

A pathogen is an agent that causes disease. In particular,
certain types of bacteria.

Belle and Sebastion were supatwee. In the end, they had fourteen people on stage. Rattling maracas and shakers and blowing on twee little bits o' brass. The Orpheum was a nice venue. Except they don't really sell much beer. But if you've got a boozing audience, how can you invite a twee bunch o' twirling teenage girls on stage for a "wee dance". Shitza, y'all homies supatwee n' shit.

I'll go see M.E. Smith in The Fall this fall, then I'll get a fill of gleeful vitriol rock noize. Sheeit biatch!